Banks in the United States are preparing for counter cyberattacks from Russia after Moscow faced new sanctions over its continued aggression into Ukraine's territory, said cyber experts and executives.
Potential new sanctions involve excluding Russian banks from Swift and the Russian central bank from international operations, moves that have, up until now, been seen as last resort measures. Shutting Moscow from Swift, the international payment system, threatens to create substantial collateral damage for companies and financial institutions.
New Sanctions Against Russia
U.S. officials managed to force Switch to ditch Iranian banks in 2018, but even that was with a far smaller economy, a move that many European governments opposed. Germany in particular is sensitive because it continues to rely on Russia for two-thirds of its gas supply.
Furthermore, Germany feels that it has already "taken one for the team" when officials announced the suspension of the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was built to transport gas from Russia to Germany. Many officials from the US, Europe, and the UK seem to have agreed on a way to minimize collateral damage by excluding the banks least involved in energy transactions, as per BBC.
The situation on the global stage comes as Western governments, for weeks, warned that the tensions could spark massive cyberattacks from Russia. Many believe Moscow will retaliate after receiving sanctions from other countries over its invasion of Ukraine.
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Senior fixed income portfolio manager at the Swarthmore Group in New York, Steven Schweitzer, said that Russia would most definitely counterattack in the cheapest way, which is through cyberattacks. Global banks, which are the target of cyberattacks even during times of peace, have opted to increase network monitoring, drilling for cyberattack scenarios, searching their networks for threats, and lining up extra staff in the event of an emergency.
According to Reuters, the list of attacks that these agencies are preparing for include ransomware and malware attacks; denial-of-service attacks, and data wiping and theft. Some said that these cybercrimes could be conducted individually or simultaneously.
Anonymous Hacker Group
The situation comes after Anonymous, the infamous hacker collective, declared cyberwar against Russia over its actions on Ukraine. The cyber group has claimed credit for the recent hacking of the Russian Ministry of Defense database. Many believe Anonymous to be responsible for a number of hacking of state TV channels in Russia to only show pro-Ukraine content.
In a Twitter post linked to Anonymous, @YourAnonOne, the group said that they were officially in a "cyberwar" against the Russian government. In the days following the announcement, the group has claimed responsibility for a number of DDoS attacks that left several websites unreachable by bombarding them with traffic.
The hacker group's nature as an informal collective has made it difficult to attribute the cyberattacks to Anonymous definitively. A consultant at U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant, Jamie Collier, said that because targeted entities would be reluctant to publish related technical data, it was severely difficult to directly tie the recent cyberattacks to Anonymous, The Guardian reported.
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